Holbrooke’s greatest achievement

I had the pleasure of meeting Richard Holbrooke twice as the organizer of a State Department briefing for the National Conference of Editorial Writers. As special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, he was the senior U.S. diplomat to address our small group in May of 2009 and April of this year (Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was curiously unavailable).

Holbrooke knew the media well, both how it worked and how to work it. He was for years a columnist for the Washington Post. In 2009, he arrived in the conference room with a New York Timesreporter New Yorker staff writer [thanks to the Maynard Institute's Richard Prince for noticing the error] in tow who was doing a profile of him – and he made sure we knew it.

Then he got down to business, speaking candidly with us off the record about the war in Afghanistan and the problems in Pakistan, taking questions for more than an hour. He did the same last spring. I learned as much in those two combined hours about the psychology behind the actors in that theater, about the culture of baksheesh and the complexity of the U.S. effort than in everything else I’ve read and heard. Holbrooke had that kind of grasp of information at his fingertips, and he was willing to share it.

Many of the encomiums to Holbrooke identify the Dayton Peace Accords that he brokered, which ended the war in Bosnia, as his greatest achievement. I’d say it was his second greatest achievement.

The first was getting the United States and NATO into the war to end the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. As Fouad Ajami writes in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Two administrations—that of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton—had been keen to avert their gaze from the unraveling of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian slaughter that followed. “Tell me again what this is all about,” President Bush would ask his secretary of state on a weekly basis. “We have no dog in this fight,” James A. Baker famously put it.

For 30 long, cruel months, Mr. Clinton’s Bosnia policy fared no better. The cavalry was always on the way; it would be there after the next massacre. There was Secretary of State Warren Christopher, eager to “shut down” the Bosnia policy, to “get it off the front pages,” all the while covering this retreat with talk of “atrocities on all sides.”

Holbrooke was the principal agitator for the change that pulled the U.S. into the fight in 1995. He had convinced a “pragmatic” Bill Clinton that American power could secure a reasonable peace at tolerable costs.

Holbrooke had been an eyewitness to the failure of U.S. foreign interventions. He knew our nation’s flaws. Yet he still believed the United States was the last, best hope for good in a world full of evil men with guns and bombs – men for whom diplomacy will only work if people of good will demonstrate they are prepared to stop them. May he rest in peace.